I was devastated to hear that our former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich died of a heart attack at age 59 a week ago, just two days after we’d last texted. He was a longtime good friend, going back to our days working together as Assistant Attorneys General for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. We shared an office wall and hit it off instantly when we discovered that he had written a conservative column for Arizona State University and I had written a conservative column for the University of Arizona.

After he became the Arizona Attorney General, I wrote countless articles about his efforts to look into wrongdoing in the 2020 election and prosecute election crimes. But strangely, due to the mainstream media spinning their coverage of him to make him appear to be soft on that issue, a false perception grew that he wasn’t tough enough. 

Critics attacked him for saying there was no election wrongdoing immediately after the 2020 election. But that was taken out of context; he merely said he hadn’t personally seen any yet in the first couple of days. People confused him with former Governor Doug Ducey, telling me that he’d certified the 2020 election results — but that was Ducey; they were mistaken.

In reality, Brnovich doggedly pursued investigations through his election integrity champion attorney, Jennifer Wright. He’d created an election integrity unit, which she led on the civil side. After the election, Brnovich told the Maricopa County Supervisors to increase the number of ballots counted by hand from two percent to five percent, but they refused. Then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs demanded that Brnovich shut down the audit, but he didn’t. He forced the supervisors to turn over materials they were........

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